


Separate Skins

by RurouniHime



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek, Don't copy to another site, Donate Life, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt Stiles, M/M, Major Illness, Original Pack, POV Derek, Pack Family, Pack Feels, Platonic Cuddling, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Slash, Protective Derek, Supernatural Illnesses, kidney donation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 19:09:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17330714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: “But it’s fine, you know? I’ve got a nephrologist and my GFR’s not that bad yet. That’s, you know. Measurement of kidney spazzing. Of course my kidneys would be spazzes. Anyway. I’m referred, I’ll go on the list for a new one, and then, bam, couple weeks in bed and I’ll be back here double-timing to make up for all the peace and quiet I’ll have put you through.”They start slow, asking questions. Derek does not. Derek inhales carefully, tunes his attention. He can smell it if he tries: faint sourness, like milk on the verge of going off. Stiles’ scent barely gives anything away.(aka, Stiles needs a transplant. He gets a living donor.)





	Separate Skins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [To all organ donors and donor families out there](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=To+all+organ+donors+and+donor+families+out+there).



> Living Donation is what I do for a living (donate life!! ^_^), so this story is an homage to that. See post-notes for a full explanation and disclaimer about that.
> 
>  **WARNINGS:** Brief vague blink-and-you'll-miss-it discussion of Kate Argent and Derek's past trauma. Stiles is 17 in this, but this is pre-slash. Nothing sexual happens. 
> 
> (Title is from Nancy Garden)

_Somehow I ended up with a piece of you and you me.  
~ Evy Michaels_

 

There are so many ways to kill a human.

They’re so _fragile._ Derek has thought about it in all permutations: how susceptible to disease they are; how, even with his enhanced senses, one instant of distraction could result in the death of the person nearest him, at his hands; the way the human body shuts down piece by piece as it ages or sickens, in ways a wolf body won’t succumb; how to actually kill a human hunter in one blow.

In the end, it’s a spell.

“A whole freaking _year_ ago, seriously.” Stiles shrugs, kicks his feet, head and neck jerking as he looks at the floor. “That crap with the faeries. Just happened to hit in exactly the wrong place. Any higher, it would only have been broken ribs and we’d all be mindlessly devouring that pizza over there at this very moment. Oh well, you win some, you lose some, right?”

No one has touched the pizza. No one has said a word, and Stiles is showing the tension of that; his cheeks are ruddy, and he’s blinking fast.

“But it’s fine, you know? I’ve got a nephrologist and my GFR’s not that bad yet. That’s, you know. Measurement of kidney spazzing. Of course my kidneys would be spazzes. Anyway. I’m referred, I’ll go on the list for a new one, and then, bam, couple weeks in bed and I’ll be back here double-timing to make up for all the peace and quiet I’ll have put you through.”

They start slow, asking questions. Derek does not. Derek inhales carefully, tunes his attention. He can smell it if he tries: faint sourness, like milk on the verge of going off. Stiles’ scent barely gives anything away.

“How’s your dad?” Erica asks.

“Oh, you know.” Stiles clears his throat. Sniffs sharply. “He’s making it work.”

Later, with most everybody gone and the pizza congealing in the box, Stiles drops onto the couch, the stack of paper plates he’d been taking to the garbage forgotten on the table. It’s like his legs go out from under him, and for a second, Derek thinks—

But no. His aborted lunge toward the couch goes unnoticed: Stiles sighs, scrubs his face with both hands, then blinks at the ceiling, mouth wide as he works his jaw.

Derek puts the glasses he’s holding aside and sits down next to him.

“It’s not _that_ bad,” Stiles shrugs after a minute.

Derek hums. Let Stiles take it as agreement.

An instant later, Stiles’ heart rate skyrockets. In direct contrast, he melts down over his knees, cradling his head in his hands. “Deaton recommended the doctor. Because magic did it.”

“Good.” As much as they all trust Deaton. 

“Derek… There are thousands of people on the transplant list. Thousands. I’ll be, I haven’t even started dialysis and you get points for that, I’ll be at the very bottom and the whole process takes, it can take _years.”_

The smell of fear curdles the air. Derek makes himself exhale. “Maybe there’s something they know that regular medicine—”

A sharp shake of Stiles’ head cuts the words right off his tongue.

“I’m a kid,” Stiles tells his knees. “Gives me some priority, but…”

He never really finishes the thought, and Derek doesn’t chase it.

**

He goes out. Runs, barefoot in jeans, stripping off his shirt and tucking it into the waistband of his pants. Ends up in the town proper hours later, padding along down an empty street with his breath clouding the air in great huffs, a fine rain stinging his skin, until he stops in front of a Closed sign on a familiar door. The glow of light is muted by the blinds.

He knocks.

Deaton gives him a number he can try and what to say, but no promises. It’s not really so common, what Derek’s looking for.

**

Derek calls after six pm, standing in the dark beneath the main staircase.

“Custom Furnishings, how may I help you?”

“Dr. Alan Deaton referred me.”

A pause. “Then this is Beth speaking.”

“I’m a werewolf.”

“Yes?”

“I have a friend who needs a kidney. A human friend. What can I do?”

**

He clicks the link she emails him, fills out his health history, and waits. Within a day, as promised, she calls him back.

It’s a long process. A _long_ process. A few months. Derek’s not sure what he was expecting. He doesn’t know much about live donation that’s not blood, and he doesn’t tend to do much of that.

It’s cold comfort, knowing that Stiles’ evaluation will take even longer. 

Beth’s human, born to a pack family, but the nurse she assists, Lanh, is a bitten wolf going on twenty years now. “And we have a surgeon who specializes in werewolf physiology. She’s very quick, fastest in the country, actually.” Beth laughs. “But there’s no one we can gloat about that to, is there?”

“If I donate,” he interrupts her. His voice cracks. “Will it turn him?”

“No. In a certain percentage of the population, the wolf gene is like the Rhesus factor protein. You know, blood type positive or negative? Well, positive-negative doesn’t actually matter for kidney donation between humans, so similarly, the wolf gene doesn’t always have the same effect on the functionality of the organ.”

“And you’ll know if I’m part of that percentage?”

“We’ll test for it, yeah. Part of the compatibility testing. We do one first off, then a final crossmatch right before surgery. If you aren’t part of that percentage, you’re ruled out.”

“Do I have to come to you for all of this?”

“We’ll do most of your testing where you are, through Dr. Deaton’s office. You’d only have to come out here for the final phase.” 

Derek rubs his forehead. “I don’t want him to know it’s me. Not until I know whether it… whether we.”

She doesn’t comment on the dropped sentence. “You can complete the entire process anonymously if you want. He’s referred through a clinic in the know, so they’ll have him sign consents about which patient populations he’s willing to accept kidneys from. The most we’ll ever tell him is whether he has a donor. We run the evaluation on your schedule and you’re not required to come in together. The closest you’ll get is side-by-side operating rooms for the transplant itself.”

“What about afterward?” A wistful yearning twists in his chest. “Will we share a room then?”

“Is he pack?” she asks gently.

Yeah, _yes,_ of course he is. “Yes.”

“I know the urge is to stay together. Especially when someone is injured. But the donor gets a separate room. Separate floor, even. You’ll have different doctors, different care teams. No crossover. It’s better for everyone’s recovery, trust me.”

“And how,” Derek starts, then backs up. “He’s going through a center in San Francisco.” He gestures at himself even though she can’t see him. “That’s not really a place… we… hang out. How do you coordinate that when they don’t know about us?”

Beth laughs again, conspiratorial. “You’d be surprised what the highest-ups know. We have a contract in place. It does limit your choice of surgery dates. But it’s safe.”

The paranoid creature inside him won’t stay quiet. He flares his nose, wishes he could smell her, hear her heart. “Why are you doing this?”

She doesn’t say anything immediately. “My mother needed a kidney. No one in the family who could donate was human. This place saved her life.”

Okay. Okay. “And what if there are others who want to be tested?”

“Other wolves?”

Derek lets his silence speak for him.

“You mean like, the whole pack?” He can hear Beth’s grin. “That is _awesome._ They’d fill out the health history form, just like you did. Hey, we could conference call if they have any questions, or I could bring you all in for an education class.” 

“Okay,” Derek sighs. “Give me the information, I’ll make sure they get it.”

**

Erica’s history of epilepsy counts her out. Too risky, even though she’s a wolf; the kanima’s poison taught them that there are some things that never truly go away.

Scott is still seventeen for five months, which incites a lot of yelling: _If my best friend is old enough to go through this kind of shit, then I’m old enough to help him!_ But the center disagrees. Legal majority or bust. Boyd has an incompatible blood type, Allison has a family history of high blood pressure—go figure—and Jackson, as it turns out after a scan, has only one kidney.

“What does that mean?” He looks around the group, jaw straining in that way that always makes him shake. “Is that, am I going to die when I’m thirty?”

“You’re not going to _die,”_ Lydia huffs, rolling her eyes. “You were born this way. You’ve always only had one kidney, it’s your body’s baseline, it’s used to it. Unless you’re planning to skewer it with a mistletoe arrow, you two will have a long and infuriating life together.”

“You don’t have to make fun of me,” Jackson grumbles.

“Look at the bright side. At least you don’t have heart issues, like Stiles’ father—imagine how that must feel—or differently sized kidneys like me.” She crosses her arms, lips pursing flat. “They’re _my_ weird kidneys. I don’t see why I can’t just sign a waiver.”

Isaac, newly eighteen, raises his hand. “I’m going to go for it.”

“No, you’re not.”

Everyone stops talking and stares at Derek. Isaac looks like Derek just stomped on his cat. Scott, on the other hand, looks like his ears are about to start shooting steam, so Derek sighs. “Because I’ll need someone who lives with me to help me out after surgery.”

And now Scott looks like he might cry. Derek scowls.

“You are not saying one word to him.” He flashes his eyes, lets them burn red until Scott nods. “Any of you. I’m not getting his hopes up before I know it’ll work.”

**

“They say I have a living donor,” Stiles says one afternoon when they’re sitting around doing nothing in the pack’s living room, and he sounds so quietly bewildered that Derek’s heart jumps.

He rolls his head where it rests on the back of the couch to look at Stiles. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Derek swallows. “Who is it?”

Stiles shakes his head. “They can’t tell me. Confidentiality stuff. Just that I have ‘a donor in process.’” He finger quotes. “And they’ll let me know if that person falls out or, you know. Decides not to do it.”

He watches Stiles picking at his knuckle with a thumbnail. “They won’t do that.”

“They might. I mean, they don’t need this.” He turns around, cross-legged, hands flailing. “You know, it’s like the only surgery you can get that can actually make your life worse? Do they even know who I am?”

“Maybe you can ask around,” Derek says, feeling like his throat has a lump of apple in it.

“Nah. The donor can tell me, though. If they want to. Hey, maybe it’s Danny.” 

“Maybe.” Derek knows for a fact that Danny got tested. He’s young, healthy, and he’s got the support structure through his mother and aunt. 

Stiles looks down at his hands, then up at Derek. His face is washed clean of the frown, every inch open and wondering. “I can’t believe someone wants to donate to me. Not to _me,_ to me, I just mean… in general. That someone would do that. Just because.” He shakes his head. “Sometimes people are amazing.”

Derek smiles. He reaches out, ruffles a quick hand through Stiles’ hair.

**

The waiting is the worst. He calls more than he should, asking if results are in, how much longer until the next step. Beth always has a smile in her voice. She gives him things to do: pamphlets to read, education classes to attend, a list of medications to retard his body’s metabolism that he needs to choose between. He’s not sure what’s donor-standard and what’s wolf-standard. 

Well, probably that last one is wolf-standard.

Meanwhile, Stiles comes over to his loft with the rest of them and weighs dialysis options and stops eating pizza and torturing milkshake straws. He brings his homework and slings it across the entire table, rubbing the back of his neck and tapping his pencil like a woodpecker. He slumps next to Derek on the couch when the light gets too dim, fidgeting and scooting and folding up his beanpole legs until he’s pushed into Derek’s side. Derek mutes the TV and tosses a blanket at him because Stiles will layer his clothing and squirrel three beanies away in his backpack, but he won’t just ask.

Stiles falls asleep on his shoulder, most nights.

His smell is worse now. Derek bends his nose just over the whorl of Stiles’ hair and inhales, again and again, until it settles in his sinuses and won’t be forgotten, can’t be wished away.

**

In March, Stiles’ body goes haywire and throws up a whole bunch of antibodies. Remnants of the spell damage. It ruins compatibility with Danny entirely.

**

Derek gets off the phone on a Friday and punches a hole in his wall, making Isaac jump so hard he drops a bag of carrots all over the kitchen floor.

“What?”

Derek crosses to the couch and sits down on it, but Stiles’ smell is all through those cushions, sick and sweet. It makes his heart race, his throat close. “They’re declining me.”

 _“What?_ Why?”

“Psych history.” He sneers. “They don’t want to disrupt the balance. God. It…” _She._ “Is still ruining my life.”

Isaac touches his shoulder, then draws his hand back. “It’s okay. I’ll go forward. It’s okay.”

**

But Isaac also has significant psych history.

Boyd asks about the exchange option, but Beth tells them there aren’t enough mismatched pairs in the were community to make such a venture viable. Lydia canvasses town, gets a few people to apply through mundane means, people who know the sheriff, who watched his kid grow up. People who watched him lose his wife.

Stiles’ antibody count remains too high for a direct match. He starts to look sick.

It’s not supposed to happen this fast. “Why is he fading like this?”

“Well…” Lanh hesitates. “You know I can’t tell you specifics of his case.”

“I _know_ that.” 

“But sometimes, if magic’s involved, it’s faster.”

He rubs his face, around the eye sockets where the pressure is worst. “Please. Lanh, _please._ You have to reconsider me.”

Lanh sighs. “It was a team decision. They’re concerned that—”

“I know what they’re concerned about!” He’s not helping his case but he can’t stop. “It was eight years ago.”

“I know this is hard,” Lanh says after a moment where they both breathe. “Donation is going to take a toll on you, physical and mental. Surgery for weres is especially taxing. You do not require this surgery. The last thing we want to do is make your life more difficult.”

Derek presses the heel of his hand against his eye. It does nothing, absolutely nothing. “I appreciate that. But I need… I _need_ to do this. My pack has lost a lot.” _I’ve lost everything once already._ “We can’t lose him.”

“You’re his Alpha.”

 _Yes,_ he’s his Alpha. “I take care of what’s mine,” he snaps. “It’s my job.”

“Is it your job to do this for him?”

The anger tries to surge around, but tangles in other things, sucking up tight against Derek’s lungs. He draws a deep breath and lets it out. “Stiles… is more. Than that.”

_He deserves better than this. Better than werewolves and monsters, better than a core of utter iron couched in tender, tearable flesh. Better than surviving the worst the otherworld has thrown at any one human, only to fall to his own failing body._

_All I’ve ever done is bring pain down on him. For once, just once, I’d like to bring hope._

It all boils down to one thing. “I want him healthy again.”

**

At Lanh’s direction, he writes an appeal letter. It takes him three days. And then he makes another appointment with the transplant psychiatrist. 

He doesn’t know if that’s normal, for the donor to push like that. It feels aggressive in a bad way. But he can’t sit still. He can’t let this happen, not to Stiles. Not because of him.

She meets with him on a Friday, with rain drumming down on the windows of her little office. She’s a were, and she smells of her Alpha and ten other wolves. She smells comfortable. Smells like stability. She asks him how he’s doing and he pushes his frustrations down and answers her questions.

“Let’s talk about mates,” she says after a moment. 

“He’s not.”

“Do you want him to be?”

Maybe she can smell it. God knows he tastes it, the barest hint of something. A future. But it could be his imagination. Could just be a pathetic wish. 

Either way. “He’s seventeen,” Derek grits out.

“And I understand why that raises a significant roadblock for you.” 

An insurmountable one. Derek feels angry, and sick. An old, familiar sickness.

“Derek.” She looks down at her hands. “I’m not trying to keep you from helping your friend. What I’m doing is making sure we don’t do you harm. And this could harm you, physically and mentally. You’re the Alpha to an entire pack, a young pack.”

“A pack that includes Stiles.”

“What if this doesn’t work? What if he rejects your kidney? How will you feel?”

Truthfully? “I don’t know.” He swallows, really thinks. “Useless.” Again. “Helpless.” Again. Unable to do the one thing he’s never been able to do: protect his family. His eyes prickle. “Devastated.”

“And what happens to your pack if you can’t move past that?”

Derek takes a deep breath. When that’s not enough time to weigh that question appropriately, he takes another. “What do you need me to do?”

“I’d want you to start seeing a psychiatrist on your own time. You have a lot of events in your past that I don’t think you’ve fully dealt with. I also think you realize that. I’m not concerned about your motivations. I am concerned that in this case, not being able to help Stiles could be just as bad for you as helping him.”

He nods. Looks at his hands much as she studied hers. The rain hisses against the glass. “Do you have any recommendations for someone I can see?”

She hands him a list. “Ongoing care, until you and your psychiatrist determine there’s no longer a need. But the initial requirement is three sessions. Do the three sessions, and I’ll talk to the team.”

**

He sets up with a man in Beacon River: weekly meetings that require an hour’s round trip. The psychiatrist is a bitten were, a beta for a pack to the south that the Hales once had alliances with. He’s short, quiet, and looks Derek right in the eye. 

Stiles goes with him once. He hangs out in the Beacon River Books coffee shop, slumping into one of the couches with his mouth working around the straw of his lemonade while Derek ‘runs errands’. When Derek pulls up in the parking lot after his appointment, Stiles passes him an iced latte. 

“On me,” he says, buckling himself into the front seat. His eyes sweep Derek head to toe, then he cranes his head to look in the back. “What did you get?”

“It’s in the trunk.” There’s a Target bag, full of lightbulbs he doesn’t need, a blender he’ll never use.

Stiles chews his straw some more. “Thanks.”

Derek’s heart speeds. “For?”

“For getting me out of town,” Stiles sighs. He’s drooping in his seat. He droops in every seat nowadays.

Derek clenches the steering wheel and slowly lets it go. “Anytime.”

**

Two weeks after Derek’s mandated three sessions in Beacon River, his case is reopened. A week after that, he’s given a final consent to sign, forgoing certain pain control after surgery because it won’t work on werewolf physiology anyway, and allowing the surgeon to use wolfsbane derivatives to keep him from healing outright during the operation. 

“It’ll make you very sick,” Lanh warns. “Very. Recovery’s going to take a while.”

He signs it. And then he’s cleared. 

Lanh gives him a selection of dates, okays the one he chooses with Stiles’ team, and calls him back. “You know the donation won’t necessarily cure him. The magical damage may just attack a new kidney.”

Oh, he remembers that part of the education.

“If you want to tell him, now would be the time.”

**

He goes to Stiles’ house and finds John there, alone.

“You know they’re holding his cath for this donor.” John blows on his coffee, then sets it down without drinking. They’re on the couch. “Should have been on dialysis a week ago, but…”

Derek’s planned speech vanishes like mist. He leans forward, braces his elbows on his knees, and does what he came here to do. The first part, at least. 

When Stiles shows up a half hour later, dropping his backpack in the hall with a tired thud, it’s to a living room on the edge of a knife. “Derek,” he says.

John gestures him over, wiping his eyes. “Sit down, kid. Just… sit.”

Stiles opens his mouth, closes it, and sits.

Derek refolds his hands. His fingers hurt from squeezing. Shouldn’t the second time be easier? “I’m your donor,” he says, blunt. “And I’ve been approved.”

Stiles stares at him, blank as he has never been before. Derek’s innards itch. He glances at John, then back again. His spine aches with the need to run.

“You…” Stiles rubs his nose. “What?”

“I’m—”

 _“Why?”_ Stiles blurts out, and Derek blinks at him.

“Because you need it.”

Stiles stares at the table, his head twitching in tiny motions. Back and forth. Suddenly he’s breathing hard, too fast, and his dad takes his shoulders and bends him forward, one hand on his forehead. “It’s okay. Breathe. It’s real, it’s okay.”

Somehow Derek ends up on Stiles’ other side, a hand on his back, feeling each hiccup and each shudder.

“I can’t believe you did this,” Stiles says, when his dad has gone to get him a glass of water. “I can’t believe that you…”

Derek shrugs. Now he’s the one staring at the table, his hands to himself again. “Believe it.”

Stiles doesn’t say anything else. Eventually he tips, comes to rest against Derek’s side.

**

Waiting for the surgery to be scheduled, waiting for his pre-op paperwork, waiting for the results of their final crossmatch: it’s worse than the whole of the evaluation. The crossmatch scares him the most. One change could throw off the entire thing, start Stiles back at square one for living donors, and what if the magic that caused it all isn’t done yet, what if it screws things up at this last minute?

But it’s fine, and Derek’s werewolf kidney will handle the antibodies that refuse to mesh. He sleeps well for the first time in months.

Scott wants to throw Stiles a pre-surgery party, the whole pack, but his dad nixes it on account of the risk. “If he gets sick, they’ll cancel. His antibodies could change, it’s just…”

Not worth it.

Derek makes arrangements with his psychiatrist’s pack leader, an older Alpha who used to visit his mother, to keep a closer eye on their borders while he’s down. He debates contacting Peter. Decides against it and turns things over to Boyd. He does contact Allison’s father, his heart in his throat, hoping he’s not making another monumental Argent-related mistake. 

The day of, Derek gets up at godawful o’clock, showers thoroughly, and drives with Isaac to the hospital in San Francisco. Traffic leaves them alone, and eventually Isaac is fidgeting with Derek in the waiting room until they call Derek in. Isaac stands in front of the double doors as they swing closed between him and Derek, his hands in his pockets.

Right before they shut, Derek hears his murmur: “We’ll be waiting for you both.”

The operation room is too bright, and cold, even for him. Derek nods along to instructions, inhales deeply when told, and counts back from ten. The wolfsbane injection burns like boiling water, crawling up his arm just as the lethargy, the heavy chill of the anesthetic, creeps down it. Together, they swirl into this visceral sandstorm inside him until he—

**

“Mr. Hale? Mr. Hale, it’s Dr. Volksberg. Can you hear me?”

He nods. Thinks he nods. It’s cold. Cold and bright. He can hear beeping.

“You’re out now. Everything went fine, you’re in the ICU.”

“Stiles,” he slurs.

The surgeon pats his arm. “Doing great. His numbers are already down.”

That’s all… all he needs to know.

**

Everything hurts.

They can’t just flush his system so soon after a trauma; the surgeon has told him the wolfsbane has to work its way out on its own. Derek just nodded and shut his eyes, and pretended to sleep until everyone went away again.

His hearing is fuzzy and strange. He can’t shift at all. Just trying to grow his claws sears like fire. The periodic pain draining from the others when they visit helps, but they’re all betas, and they can’t do it forever. He hovers on the edge of vomiting all day, all night. It’s been so long since he’s dealt with that kind of thing that he can’t focus on anything else. Sleep is impossible, until he’s so exhausted it’s the only thing left.

And moving. Moving is agony, right through his center. 

He’s feels empty, hollowed out in a much greater way than just a missing organ. It’s… done. Nothing left to do. No one around most of the time, except the nurses periodically checking his vitals. He’s glad he can’t move: the grief, the loneliness, is deep, inexplicable, and he has no way of fighting it.

John comes in, sits next to the bed. He doesn’t say a word, but he slips a hand around Derek’s wrist, cool against the wolfsbane fever, and squeezes. Derek sinks and resurfaces twice after his arrival, and each time, John’s still there.

 _Thank you._ It echoes in the room like a chime. _God, thank you._

But it might have been a dream.

**

The room’s dim two days after the surgery when the door opens. Stiles shuffles in wheeling an IV pole. He shuts the door, closing out the faint light from the hallway. Even that’s enough to hurt Derek’s eyes.

He pads over the to bed in his ankle socks and stands there in a baggy hospital gown. “Hey.”

It’s hushed. 

“Hey,” Derek croaks. He smiles, and Stiles smiles back, wavery. Derek’s eyesight is getting better: Stiles looks tired, but his cheeks are flushed and healthy, his fingers curling and uncurling repeatedly around the IV pole, tap-tap-tapping. He moves like he’s been beaten, stiff and careful.

“You have a super kidney,” Stiles whispers, “just so you know.”

Derek huffs, and regrets it when it pulls at his… everywhere. “You’re welcome,” he manages. Stiles makes a face and creeps closer. 

“You’re not up yet? They had me walking almost the same day.” 

Derek lifts one hand, the one with the picc line in the back of his wrist. It’s a monumental effort. God, he’s so weak; a child could take him out. “Leftovers. Wolfsbane.”

Stiles rubs his face, but Derek still hears the curse he mutters. Stiles places a hand against his own side, as though he’s covering a knife wound, and peers down at the bed. “Which one did they…”

“Left.” Easier to get to, apparently. Less complicated attachments. Not that it matters to the pain.

“Okay.” Stiles wheels his pole next to the bed, fiddles with the tubing, then painstakingly climbs up onto the mattress. Derek lifts his head, blinking, but Stiles just grunts, shuffles under the blanket and settles himself oh so carefully against Derek’s right side. He lets out a pained sigh, his head coming to rest on Derek’s shoulder. He loops an arm around Derek’s chest, and shuts his eyes.

God, he’s warm. Derek hooks a hand over his hip. Tugs him close.

“You smell like me.” He _does,_ a little. Deep down, deeper than... than skin. And maybe it’s only Derek’s imagination, but maybe, just maybe, it’s not.

Stiles rubs his face against Derek’s shoulder. “Good.”

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> A note: I have worked in kidney donation for about seven years, specifically in living donation for the majority of that. It’s an incredible field of medicine to work in, and can be energizing and depressing, but is often extremely rewarding. I love my department and I love working in this field. I love helping get people through a trying and scary time, and coming out the other side healthier, happier, closer to each other. 
> 
> Like Stiles says, it’s amazing what people will do, how much they will give, to help another person, sometimes a complete stranger. The living donor process is strictly voluntary, and protocols are put in place to keep pressure on the donor to a minimum. There are both medical and psycho-social requirements that must be met, and all of the situations discounting the other members of the pack here are valid issues that pop up. The main takeaway I want potential donors to have is that if we find something during the eval that excludes them, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are unhealthy; it means that _if_ we took a kidney, they may _become_ unhealthy later, and that’s the last thing we want. There are other absolutely necessary roles that family and friends can take on, such as support during and after surgery (you wouldn’t BELIEVE the amount of anti-rejection meds a recipient has to take for years after surgery, not to mention, a recipient could be denied for transplant if there is no support structure in place, because of the magnitude of this type of operation) or scouting out other potential donors on the recipient’s behalf (what Lydia does in this story).
> 
> The basics in this fic are all drawn from my experience, but the evaluation/recovery described here (aside from being werewolf-and Derek-specific, of course) is NOT indicative of the norm. The donor eval can be a very subjective process, depending heavily on the potential donor’s history and individual needs. So please don’t use this story as a standard template for any real-life information gathering about kidney donation.
> 
> HOWEVER. If you have questions or are interested in more info, please ask! I am happy to answer what I can. For more general info on donating or receiving a kidney, please visit the [**National Kidney Registry’s (NKR) website**](https://www.kidneyregistry.org/).


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